The metal board arching over the shaft entrance was so rusted, I
could barely make out the lettering -- Champion Reefs. Once upon a
time a forbidden place, now the gate stood wide open, hanging on a
couple of broken hinges. The security guard standing near the
opposite building saw my camera and beckoned to me to go right in.
It was traumatic. No pass. No safety helmet. No smell of dust and
ore. And not a miner in sight.

The Kolar Gold Fields. Once upon a time a dream town, with picture
perfect houses and lawns and big shady trees. Miners streaming out
of the shafts, dark with the dust of the underground, talking to
each other about mundane everyday things: debts and marriages and
children and wives. Where ore-laden trolleys rattled along between
the shafts and the processing units. Where the 'oostle' (siren
whistle) regimented the lives of the people and giant hoists
lowered men into the belly of the earth. Where the rumble of rock
bursts deep underground cracked walls and men died a thousand
deaths in search of the precious yellow metal.

But now, everything stood still. Eerily silent. The mines were
officially closed. Dead. Deader than dead. I had just driven past
rows of once-majestic bungalows crumbling into dust. And now this.
A shaft head bereft of miners. As I hesitated near the shaft
entrance, the guard urged me on. "Go right in. There is nothing
there. Nothing."

Inside, the giant hoists stood still. The thick black cables which
once lifted the cages laden with men and ore were missing. They
had been brought all the way from England over a hundred years
ago. Now they lay coiled up in some unknown warehouse. The
machinery was gone too. Even the wagons were missing. Thorny
bushes were beginning to grow on the mud floor trodden flat by the
feet of generations of miners.

I was listening to the stories of the silence when I heard the
rattling. A big, rumbling sound as if some machinery was working.
The guard had said there was nothing. And there was
nothing. Nothing seemed to move. There was that rumbling again.
Ghosts?

Terrified, I was about to run out. And then, I saw them. The
monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys. Families playing on the hoists.
Climbing those tall metal girders. Jumping on the zinc sheet
covering. And I heard the wind. The famous gusty KGF wind rattling
the zinc sheets.

Once upon a time, barely 150 years ago, the wind had blown
unchecked across this barren, thorny plateau. No one lived then on
this rocky, waterless, unarable land.

But that was just a phase. It had not always been so. Legend goes
that hundreds of years earlier, during the reign of the Cheras, a
poor shepherd walking on this rocky plateau stumbled upon a
treasure large enough to make him a king. He called his kingdom
Kolar. Nobody knows what happened to that kingdom. And what was
that treasure? Was it gold? Was it buried treasure? No one knows
that either.

It has been proven, though, that there were ancient gold mines in
this area. The first recorded reference to these 'native' mines
came in 77 AD when the Roman historian Pliny wandered through this
land and found signs of mining. He wrote about ancient abandoned
pits, as deep as 200 feet. He found basic digging tools and pots
for carrying the ore.

No one, however, attempted to work these pits again and so another
1,800 years rolled by. The barren land remained untouched. Then,
in the 1870s, an adventurous British soldier named Lavelle was
posted in the Bangalore cantonment, barely a hundred kilometres
away. He had heard of the old native mines and was convinced there
were rich veins of gold running through the land. He managed to
get a couple of army bigwigs to pool in money and form a
consortium, which in turn leased the land from the Maharaja of
Mysore to whom it belonged.

But gold didn't come out of the earth so easily. For several
years, they dug in vain. Finally, they hired the famous John
Taylor and Company which had been responsible for finding gold in
Africa.

The rest is history. Rich veins of gold were struck in Marikuppam
in 1880. By 1883, there were four shafts. The landscape changed
rapidly. Colonial bungalows with colourful gardens, club houses,
hospitals, schools and long rows of huts for the labourers
mushroomed over the next couple of years. The shafts sprang up
like needles as more and more veins were struck.

By the 1920s, when the mining industry was at its peak, KGF
occupied 30 square miles and supported a population of 90,000
people. Of these, 24,000 were employed by the mines; 400 employees
were European and 400 were Anglo-Indian. The rest were 'native'
labourers, social and economic outcasts drawn from neighbouring
Tamil and Telugu areas.

Life in the mines was hazardous. A 1928 health report says there
were four to 14 families living in each of the two-roomed huts
provided by the company for the labourers. The miners worked in
the cavernous underground passages, wearing flimsy hats made of
bamboo and carrying oil lamps to light their way. Temperatures
often touched 67 degrees C. It was literally like working in
hell.

And yet, life was comfortable. KGF got power as soon as the first
power station was opened. The local government, whose exchequer
was considerably fattened with the royalty paid by the British
company, was eager to keep the mines going.

By 1901, gold production was peaking. Between 1901 and 1910, the
grade quality of the ore averaged at nearly 30 grams per tonne. In
some years, it even peaked to 40 GPT. In those 10 years, over
170,000 kg of gold was extracted, all of which went directly to
England.

The years rolled by. The Indian Independence movement left this
little town untouched. Only in 1956 did the government decided to
nationalise the mines. By this time, the GPT had dropped to 10.
The mines were depleted, but there was plenty of gold still left.
Some of the shafts were the deepest in the world and they were
still being worked.

The ever-growing gray dumps of powdered ore bore testimony to the
extent to which the mines had been worked. Workers grumbled about
the hard life and health hazards. But they knew no other life. By
the 1960s, most of the men and women who lived in KGF had been
born and brought up there. They had developed their own special
skills and did not want to live anywhere else. By now,
retrenchment was not just a distant nightmare. The veins of ore
were getting more and more difficult to find. No one knew what
would happen to the miners when they finally petered out.

A factory to manufacture earthmovers was set up on the outskirts
of KGF near a big banyan tree, with silver fox bats hanging from
its branches, reflecting in the pool located in front of it. But
Bharat Earth Movers never really made an impact on the lives of
the miners, whose skill sets did not match the factory
requirements.

By the 1990s, things were serious. The mines were running at a
terrible loss, partly because of the government. The price at
which gold was purchased from the mines was much below the market
price. Keeping the mines alive had become a more and more unviable
proposition. Yet, where was the alternative?

And so came the decline. Retrenchment was the norm. Hiring came to
a total stand-still. The huge elegant houses began to decay with
neglect. Criminal elements began to take over the little town.

Meanwhile, long time residents tried desperate measures to find
alternative solutions. Vincent Abraham, a senior engineer who also
handled mine's public relations, speaks of the time they made a
survey to see if the dying mines could be turned into a tourist
attraction as in South Africa.

The KGF, at 100 kms from Bangalore, is ideally located. The response
from the tourism industry was good. The bungalows could be turned
into guesthouses and tourists could go down the shafts in 'cages'
that were 100 years old. However, New Delhi turned down the
suggestion on the grounds that a company which had been
constituted to mine for gold could not diversify into tourism.
Several similar alternatives were also dismissed.

Foreign companies, which initially expressed interest in working
the dumps of mine tailings, later backed out. There was another
proposal to start a hosiery unit or somehow try and tap the
knitting and embroidery skills of the women, especially the
Anglo-Indians.

Nothing worked.

"No one in Delhi cares if the mines are closed or if people die
here," said an old-timer bitterly. "No one has even visited this
place. They scoff when we talk of the old times. As far as they
are concerned, KGF has no historical importance. The people can
die. All that matters is that the mines no longer make money."

The last few hundred miners who were left on the rolls when the
mines were officially closed have been offered a lay-off package
but have gone to court, egged by their union leaders. In KGF
itself, many are divided over this issue. Some feel they should
take what is given and try and start a new life.

When Medha Patkar came to KGF a few months ago, to lead protest
marchers to the Vidhana Soudha (as the government in Karnataka is
known), one of the dissidents says he told her KGF was actually
the birthplace of activism and they didn't need people from
outside coming to teach them to protest. "Look where our protests
have led us," he said angrily. According to him, politicians of
various hues and of varying degrees of importance have visited KGF
and promised to take care of them. But nothing ever
materialised.

As a result of this tussle, the last of the miners have been
hanging in limbo for months together. No pay. No retrenchment
benefits. Just Rs 4,000 released from their own money to help them
tide over the present dire crunch. Meanwhile, hundreds of people
commute from KGF to Bangalore everyday in search of work. Some of
the more fit young men find work with security agencies. Women
with basic English education picked up at the convent school work
as shop assistants. The money they earn just about helps them to
survive.

But, as things deteriorate in their town, they wonder how long
they can continue to live there. The company hospital is already
closed. The KGF Boys School, once the pride of the mining town, is
a ruin. The houses are crumbling as there is no one left to
maintain them. The golf course, the club and the open spaces have
been taken over by brambles. Desperate for alternate employment,
some are talking of forming co-operatives to start sericulture,
since silkworm farming has been very successful in neighbouring
villages. In order to do so, though, they need government
permission to use the land and seed money to start the venture.

Meanwhile, the monkeys take over the shaft heads, brambles swallow
the houses and people starve inside the once-famous labour lines.
T S Eliot was right. This is the way the world ends. Not with a
bang but a whimper.